The Day Sixty Neighbors Picked Grandma’s Peaches

What the homes could not use went to the food pantry, thirty bushels, and Willard’s people helped wash and bag them.

Grandma made me promise to save three baskets back for the ones who had picked, so nobody went home empty handed. Every family left with a sack.

The crowd started thinning out around four. People came by Grandma’s chair one at a time before they left. Some of them shook her hand.

Some of them kissed her cheek. A few of the old men just tipped their caps and did not trust themselves to say anything.

Sudie came to give the bucket back. She held it out with both hands.

“Keep it, baby,” Grandma said. “Bring it back next July and we’ll fill it again.”

Sudie looked up at her grandmother for permission, then hugged that bucket to her chest. Grandma watched her go down the drive with it, the canvas strap dragging in the red dust.

“Granddaddy would’ve liked that,” I said.

“He would’ve loved it,” Grandma said. “He always said that bucket was too big for one woman.”

By five, there were only a handful of us left. Jarvis was loading Willard’s empty baskets back onto the trailer.

A couple of the church ladies were folding the table. The ladders were mostly gone. The sun was still high and hot over the pines.

I walked the rows one more time to look for anything we had missed. Most of the trees were bare of ripe fruit, just the hard green ones left that would come in next week.

But at the very top of the old tree at the end of the second row, the one Grandma had sat under all day, there was one branch still loaded.

It was way up high, ten or twelve feet. The teenage boys had all gone home.

It was the oldest tree in the orchard, one of the few still standing from the first planting in 1972, and the top of it had always been the hardest to reach.

Grandma saw me looking. “Leave those,” she said. “That’s too high for anybody now. Let the birds have a few.”

Dewayne had been standing by his mower, ready to go. I had thought he was about to leave without saying anything else.

He walked over and looked up at that branch for a while with his hands on his hips.

Then he went and got Jarvis’s tall orchard ladder off the trailer, the twelve-footer, and carried it back down the row on his shoulder.

He set the legs in the soft dirt and leaned it into the branches and worked it until it sat right.

“Dewayne,” Grandma said. “Your knees.”

“They’ll keep, Mama,” he said.

He picked up an empty half-bushel and hooked it on the ladder’s top rung. He looked at Grandma one more time. She did not tell him no.

Then my uncle put his boot on the first rung and started up the ladder.